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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23180728">The Lullaby Tree</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger'>Goldmonger</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Child Death, Gen, Physical Abuse, chuck shurley is chaotic neutral</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 15:55:59</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,580</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23180728</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people don't have enough good memories to make their own Heaven, so Chuck takes over. When he's not busy avoiding his plentiful offspring and creating this problem, of course.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Chuck Shurley &amp; Original Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Lullaby Tree</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMNcq_EvArU">This</a> is ultimate Chuck Shurley bop.</p><p>* Story draws heavily from 'The Lovely Bones' by Alice Sebold and 'Paradiso' by Dante Alighieri.</p><p>* Trigger warning for descriptions of violent physical abuse below.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The girl had been dead for a while, Chuck could see. Her pink graphic t-shirt was dark with dried blood that had spattered up her neck to fleck her jaw, her skin mottled grey in contrast. Her eyes were wide and blue and empty where they watched him, peering through matted strands of hair.</p><p>“Who the hell are you?”</p><p>The blood had streaked up the walls. There were even traces of it on the ceiling. It had been all over her father’s hands when they led him away, but somehow the smell of it was strongest here, seeped into the paint and drywall and plaster like lead that would poison the house for decades.</p><p>“How did you get in here?”</p><p>Perhaps it would have been easier if there had been bellows and crashes in the dead of night, or a hulking beast of a man that kicked over his trash and keyed his car when he told him to cool it. It would have made more sense than a smiling nine-to-fiver with a little girl who occasionally sported black eyes, a bulbous purple nose, the slightest limp. <em>Hockey game,</em> he would call as Chuck strolled past their gates with a curious wave. <em>Kids, am I right? You got any?</em></p><p>“Put your hands where I can see them!”</p><p>He ignored the jittery cops, and unfolded from his crouch next to the small, battered body. Its spirit was gone, but the girl was still all over this room, in pieces the coroners would probably never find. She was in the utility closet, in the bathroom sink, and in her bed, where she had rosary beads tied to the headboard, dangling where she could touch them when she prayed. He strained to recall her voice, to pull up one of the billion pleas he ignored every day, even a word she might have spoken to him offhand on the street. It was like searching the ocean for a teardrop. Worse, actually, because he’d been integral to making the sea and its depths. This, he thought, as he willed himself thirty feet away and promptly threw up in his own sink, this reeked of his absence.</p><p>After several minutes of dry hacking, he sank down to the parquet, his back against the cupboards he’d spent hours lovingly glazing with polish. He ran his fingers agitatedly through his hair, over his scalp, the skull he’d carved himself, thinking, thinking. The police wouldn’t come hammering at his door any moment; he’d wafted a bend in the light around his face to throw them off, so he could investigate while keeping the writerly veneer he was so fond of. He knew they’d be over soon, regardless. He was the next-door neighbour. How could he not know something?</p><p>He could see her corpse and its leavings as though he’d conjured them in his kitchen, a puzzle in too many pieces. There was a hank of her curls by the potted begonia, a shard of her rib in the fireplace. Three of her teeth were underneath the sofa, where her head had been smacked repeatedly off the floor.</p><p>
  <em>Kids, am I right?</em>
</p><p>She’d smiled at him once, at the same time her father bared his teeth in a mocking facsimile and squeezed her shoulder. He’d barely blinked at the display, the oddly possessive slant. She was his child, after all.</p><p>
  <em>You got any?</em>
</p><p>He drummed his fingers against his knee to quell the itch that arose without warning, the indefatigable urge to mould, to tend, to fix. It was a primal instinct, as old as his conscious mind.</p><p>
  <em>Kids, am I right?</em>
</p><p>He slammed his head back against the cupboard, heard it crack.</p><p>
  <em>You got any?</em>
</p><p>The Devil would walk among them in a matter of months, but Chuck didn’t miss his son, couldn’t, not with friends like these.</p><p>He raised his fingers to snap them, and almost choked on the sudden shame of such posturing, of acting like he truly was that shrinking violet that had dithered for weeks over sending Dean Winchester to Hell, like it wasn’t something he did for kicks in the Old Testament days. He liked the disguise, the shelter, the peace and quiet, but he sensed that marinating in humanity had turned him soft and complacent, leaching him of the authority that had once bowed continents just by existing in vague proximity. Now he bought groceries. He stood in line at the DMV. He paid his cable bill, and threw soccer balls back over the fence when tiny, petrified girls kicked them into his garden.</p><p>It was effortless to close his eyes, more of a trial to open them. When he did, he was in Heaven.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Avoiding the angels was simple. They scuttled about busily like ants through a mound of dirt, so neat in their little lines, intent on their tasks, their five-thousand-times-their-weight duties. The hustle and bustle reminded him of the days of Babel, Jericho and Gomorrah, not to mention the Flood; the excitement was palpable, ozone thick where he flitted past. They were energised, he saw, practically brimming with excitement for the wars to come, and the preparations to saturate the Earth with their grace for the first time in millennia. Seeing bloodlust spread through the hive mind of the Host was disconcerting, if not novel, though the furore he saw didn’t worry him yet. They were all still waiting for his Word, after all, and would capitulate to it without question.</p><p>Of course.</p><p>He felt a burning sensation under his skin, like something within him was healing wrong, and hurriedly checked his hands. It hadn’t happened for a while now, but sometimes the holes there puckered red and raw, and wrenched open, like eyes. When he studied them the ghosts of the wounds winked up at him, blushing proudly.</p><p>Chuck restrained a litany of damnations with difficulty. The last thing he needed was Zachariah or Uriel hearing about unsanctioned holy activity in the Fifth Sphere. He had blocked all calls with the ID ‘777’ for years now, and he wasn’t about to drop his vow of silence this close to their desperate thrust at Armageddon. He had books to write, after all.</p><p>After hunkering down for a bit of searching, he realised it was taking him longer than it should have to find a single soul. He reached out, brilliance incarnate, for that piece of Creation – willed it to come home, the way all souls wanted to, to his core. He found it secluded behind a door he’d rushed by at first, thinking it too quiet for the newly ascended. Up top, fresh deaths tended to be loud, obtrusive; ear-shattering parties and concerts, uproarious reunions and reruns of the glory days. He pushed inside cautiously, ready for anything.</p><p>He found himself in the living room he’d scarpered from less than an hour ago, though this version was noticeably cleaner. The television blared cartoons in the settling twilight, and across from it a small child hunched in a reclining armchair, remote control in her lap as she ate chocolate pudding from a drum the size of her head. Chuck swallowed, inched in front of the TV.</p><p>“Emily?”</p><p>The girl looked up, surprised, with pudding dripping from her mouth and nose. In a few hours, in the faux darkness, the consistency would make it indistinguishable from blood.</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p>“Hi!” He fidgeted the way his cringing persona would, the image of awkwardness, succumbing to the routine with troubling ease. “Um. Do you know me?”</p><p>Emily blinked, her massive eyes glassy as marbles. “Mr. Shurley? You’re from next door.” She shovelled in more pudding, gaze already drifting to the TV show warbling behind him. “Hiya.”</p><p>“Hiya,” he said softly, wishing he’d come up with a better opener. He appraised the room, the dour surroundings receding in the background as the cartoon went on, bright and bubbly on a screen almost the size of the adjacent wall, now that he took note of it properly. That definitely hadn’t been a feature in the mortgaged two-storey clapboard that resembled his own. “This was a good day for you, huh?”</p><p>“This is the best day of my life,” said Emily, beaming through a chocolatey mess, then returning to her show, unconscious of Chuck’s sagging shoulders.</p><p>“Y-yeah? No uh – no fun times at school, or, um – friends that you –,”</p><p>“Daddy doesn’t want me to have friends,” she said. “And he doesn’t want me to go to school anymore.” She licked the spoon, and dropped it unceremoniously. Behind him, the cartoon and its music faded, and the room grew larger around them, until Chuck was of a height with the ottoman. The giant furniture blackened and loomed as the sun dipped fully, growing shadows that lengthened the longer he stared.</p><p>“Are you lost, Mr. Shurley?”</p><p>Emily had drawn her limbs in, hugging herself as she was slowly ingested by the armchair. Her father would never come home from work again, but she would suffer the memory of him doing so while reality lingered – Chuck, the foreign entity, the interruption to her version of a perfect day.</p><p>“I – I think so.” He gestured to the room, the nightmare fuel that arose, smoke-like, from shelves and plants and sofas. “I’m trying to get to a happy place. Can you take me to the happiest, best place you know? Better even than this?” He filtered out of time and space and back again, right next to her, on a gigantic seat cushion that stank of cigarettes.</p><p>If Emily was unnerved by his abilities, she didn’t show it. She merely nodded, her face moon-pale in the gloom, and tugged on his hand. The living room melted away to reveal a dingy classroom, its walls half-heartedly decorated with fingerpainted art pinned to corkboards, multi-coloured maps of America, and alphabet foam stickers arranged in motivational quotes.</p><p>
  <em>DO YOUR BEST!</em>
</p><p>
  <em>SHARING IS CARING!</em>
</p><p>
  <em>GOOD GIRLS KEEP THEIR TRAPS SHUT!</em>
</p><p>Chuck chewed his lip hard enough that copper pooled on his tongue, and distractedly let Emily pull away towards the front of the classroom. A lone woman had materialised there, entirely concentrated on the papers in front of her. She didn’t look up as either of them approached.</p><p>“I have detention,” said Emily, with a tentative smile. “Today I can stay at school all afternoon with Mrs. Mallow.”</p><p>“Oh,” said Chuck. Sunlight streamed in the awning windows, pooling on the thin carpet and casting everything in gold. The cool breeze carried in the chatter of kids heading home, and the mingling laughter of younger stragglers waiting for parents, tossing around a football or jumping rope, chanting nonsensical lyrics that he mouthed without thinking, along with Emily. She sat down at the desk right before the young woman, who seemed harried, eager to finish grading papers so the day could be over. Emily picked up a pen and started writing, in the clumsy block script of the young and unfamiliar. <em>I must never speak out of turn,</em> she wrote, tongue sticking out.<em> I must never speak out of turn. </em>Her pencil left deep grooves in the paper. <em>I must never speak out of turn. </em></p><p>This day would never be over, Chuck thought. This detention and those papers would carry on for an eternity. It was an understanding that ate at some disparate part of his removed self, rotted it until another bit crumbled, nauseating him. Compassion was a hazardous indulgence he allowed himself only once in a while, when he prodded a Winchester out of danger, or soothed Joshua’s anxieties, or automatically knocked some preteen’s bike away from a hurtling truck. He wasn’t the type to dwell on guilt – he was a writer, not a puppeteer, after all. But there were times when he could admit he’d dropped the ball. Shit the bed. Really, really fucked up.</p><p>He rubbed the back of his neck feverishly, sacred, unnatural blood coating his throat.</p><p>“Emily.”</p><p><em>I must never speak out of turn.</em> “Uh-huh?”</p><p>“Do you want to see something cool?”</p><p><em>I must never speak out of turn.</em> “I have detention.”</p><p>“I know. We can come straight back if you don’t like it.”</p><p><em>I must never speak out of turn.</em> Emily tilted her head, spine curved over like a septuagenarian.</p><p>“Okay, I guess.”</p><p>She held out her hand, minuscule, too small to really fit into in his own. It was a failing, he realised, that he couldn’t even hold her right.</p><p>He stepped away, towing Emily carefully, the way one would a balloon with a frayed string. He didn’t think she cared all that much about his Orphean concern, her undeterred focus suddenly on the Spheres, and the unspooling cosmos that rolled beneath them. He prepared to turn tour guide and regale her about the prophet Dante, a promising poet that couldn’t keep his visions about the divine to himself, but he was transfixed and muted by her joy, unprecedented, plain as day. She reached out towards the clouds of stardust with open delight, tracing the fiery imprints left by asteroids and clutching at the downy feathers of feckless, overworked angels scattered about Heaven like sand. Her soul was incandescent as they flew. It burned like a supernova.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>The Empyrean would have seemed almost deserted, were any angel to skim past it. Not that that would ever happen accidentally; there was a legion of seraphim directed to guard his personal refuge from exterior interference on pain of permanent termination.</p><p>(They were all terrified of the ultimate end, the Empty, the place God forgot. Chuck didn’t like to talk about it all that much, its rumours all too reminiscent of his sister, but he couldn’t deny it had its uses.)</p><p>The place was designed to be unappealing from the outside, an ancient throne room long left idle by an absent Lord. Any relics had long been scooped up by the principalities when he went AWOL, and all that had been left as far as anyone knew were traces of old souls, remnants of the crusading warriors and hair-shirt-wearing weirdos he had pretended to like back when worship was synonymous with bad hygiene. It wasn’t his most charming façade for the truly sacred, but it did the task of keeping his troops busy and warding off rubber-necks, so he considered it a rare success.</p><p>Emily was gawking at the gold-plated guards, apparently on the verge of introducing herself, so he manipulated their invisibility into matter and reassembled them inside the fortress, apropos of nothing. Without warning was always the best way, with this. Ripping off the band-aid.</p><p>“I haven’t been back in a while,” he said, mostly just to say something. Emily’s jaw had gone slack, popped in astonishment instead of under the crooked aegis of gravity, when pink foam had puddled between her lips and the carpet. She wandered forwards, Alice in a strange land, the light colouring her cheeks as its warmth strengthened her stride. It still worked then, Chuck thought, the relief more potent than he expected when it washed over him. His efforts had waned but not putrefied over the ages, as they had elsewhere.</p><p>“It’s beautiful,” said Emily, her tears dripping from her startled face to the ground and sprouting wildflowers, clusters of them that sprang up in dewy rainbow hues and spread, bursting over hills that stretched forever into a horizon that drank but would never swallow its sun. “Is this yours?”</p><p>“Sort of,” he said, leading her into a flush of verdure, plunging past dirigible blooms and butterflies fat with nectar that bumped into him happily, the way souls always wanted to. Fireflies and fluffy dandelion seeds drifted by their heads as they walked, carrying with them the aromas of honeysuckle and sugarcane from the dusty pink fields that encroached from the west, flat and rosy in the afternoon haze. The east was thicker with growth, boasting a sprawling jungle-forest that was barely visible from where they tramped through ferns twice their height. Starling murmurations swelled from the treetops and twirled to Emily’s coos of appreciation, undulating into the lavender, sparkle-strewn sky and behind them, towards a distant huddle of cabins and cottages that were lit from within by a glow that resembled candlelight.</p><p>“Who lives there?” asked Emily, pointing. Chuck looked back to the little village, bordered with low stone walls and fuzzy ruminants that ambled soporifically, grazing on grass that would stay green and rippling in the breeze no matter how much they ate. Smoke rose in whorls from an assembly of chimneys and echoed the faintest, contented whispers.</p><p>“The very, very tired,” said Chuck, through an ancient, dulled pain. “Some chil – people, I mean, like you – they just pass through here before getting to their own Heavens, the ones I make especially for them. Others prefer to rest. They just want the option to sleep, uninterrupted.”</p><p>“Can I visit there someday?”</p><p>“If you’d like.”</p><p>“Cool.” Emily’s smile was becoming a fixture, an expression that no longer ached.</p><p>They carried on trudging through the sweetly-scented meadow, the grass rising like a swelling sea before their feet, their perambulatory path to nowhere, to everywhere, as far as Emily knew. As they travelled the air became dense, as though humid, and Emily started nodding her head. Her brow crinkled in bewilderment, as though the movement had been involuntary.  </p><p>“Woah. Do you hear that?”</p><p>Chuck felt the hum in his bones, a drone that penetrated his being. It wasn’t music, the way the wind wasn’t music, but it wracked him the same. It was the song that circulated in his mind endlessly, an anthem for the left behind, the forgotten. It would – should – have been an alarm, but he’d been tuning it out for so long that the nomenclature hardly fit anymore. He only really noticed it when he returned.</p><p>“I do,” he said to her, as the crescendo rattled him, soothing her in the same beat.</p><p>They crested a hill and she squinted in the direction they were heading, gasping as the mist shied away from Chuck’s presence. “Look!”</p><p>A tree wider than a hundred Redwoods and a thousand times as tall lurched into the stratosphere as they approached, vibrating at a frequency only Chuck could discern. Its bole was a rich, chocolate brown and velvety smooth, its foliage representing every shade of every colour on and outside the human visual spectrum. Its boughs pointed in every direction, spiralling like vines and curving like antlers, sturdy and dense in order to support their weight, which manifested in cradles. Billions of them, as far as the eye could see, and far, far beyond that.</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>“The last abode of God,” said Chuck calmly, beckoning her on until they came to the foot of the tree, which was more like a wall, close as they were. Emily touched the trunk, its surface like the hide and fur of a great slumbering animal. She absorbed the sight of the cradles, the nearest and lowest filled with infants breathing as one, huddled in the recesses of a long sleep. She wound her fingers between the fine strands on the tree, seeming very much as though she was trying not to cry.</p><p>“Are they dead?”</p><p>“On Earth,” said Chuck, heavy with the kind of misery that he normally attempted to keep far away from here. His aura had a habit of distending, metastasising his emotions until they grew form and sentience, if he wasn’t careful. His rage and malaise often adopted the behaviour of a disease, slinking into the roots of a place and destroying it from the inside.</p><p>“Like me.”</p><p>Chuck nodded. He was so much better at secreting himself away and writing books. He hadn’t had this much direct contact with a human in a professional capacity since Moses, no matter what the hunger-strikers in the Middle Ages claimed. He’d spent those centuries on a bender in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and winced when he found out about the plague. Mostly because the rats had gotten credit for it in the end.</p><p>Emily was wiping away her tears, and Chuck patted the tree in what he hoped was a reassuring way. “It’s okay. We’re in a special Heaven, made for people like you.”</p><p>Emily sniffed. “Like me?”</p><p>“Well, yes.” That burn again, searing, trickling fire down his wrist. He snatched back his hand, stuffing it quickly in his pocket when he saw the holes, and strings of muscle and tendon peeling over bone. “I renovated my old hangout, since I’m never here anyway. Made it a – a nursery, of sorts. A Heaven catering to the very young, and the very deprived.”</p><p>“Deprived?”</p><p>He coughed. “I mean – kids like yourself, you know. The kind that never went to, uh, Disneyland.” To put it mildly, he thought sourly.</p><p>“Oh.” Emily sat down cross-legged in the swaying grass and buttercups, still watching the tree. Chuck joined her after a moment, sighing.</p><p>“I didn’t want to upset you. I brought you here to – you know, have some peace, some adventure. I’ll make you your own Heaven.”</p><p>She peered at him sluggishly, confused. “I can’t stay here?”</p><p>“This is a stop-off, for you,” he said. “A resting place, remember? Just while I construct your own paradise. Only the babies stay. They have no memories to build on, really, so. They all sleep.”</p><p>“Right.” They were quiet for a minute, the air pleasantly warm and fragrant. The sun dribbled, egg-yolk yellow, but did not sink.</p><p>“I don’t remember dying,” said Emily, her eyelids drooping.</p><p>“No,” said Chuck. “You won’t.”</p><p>Birds twittered and swam between stars, and vivid, furry bees lolled over punnets of flowers that grew ripe with fruit, unlike anything on any Earth Chuck had made. It was beautiful here, he knew, so beautiful it wrung your brain of anguish.</p><p>If you were human. If you were anybody else but him.</p><p>“I wish I’d known about here before,” said Emily, already slurring her speech, the thrum of the tree replacing her heartbeat. “I wish someone had told me. That I’d be all right, even. I prayed every night, every single night, sometimes twice. Just in case God was busy the first time around.”</p><p>Chuck’s pockets and socks were full of blood. His veins were like culverts angled between his metacarpals and tarsals, spilling into the undammed lakes left by hammered nails into wood. A lesson he kept forgetting.</p><p>“It’s loud out there,” he croaked eventually. “It gets – it gets loud. Hard to hear.” <em>Hard to bear.</em></p><p>“I guess so,” said Emily, and Chuck felt hollowed out, an empty vessel. She trailed a hand through a sprig of daisies that sprinkled petals like new snow.</p><p>“Do you think God could try to listen though? Just to – to kids like me, maybe?”</p><p>The petals were whisked away by the wind, transformed by the Midas touch of the sunset.</p><p>“Then this place mightn’t get so full,” she said. “He wouldn’t have to build as many Heavens.”</p><p>“Good point,” said Chuck, ignoring the catch in his throat, the abrupt awareness of his will back on Earth. <em>Sam and Dean are in a cell right now. Demons are circling the police station and one of them is possessing a sheriff who is pointing a gun at Dean, and it’s too soon, he can’t die yet – </em></p><p>He shook, dripping red. The bullet struck an artery. It hit Sam instead. It missed, or ricocheted off the wall. Reality became fractal, new worlds spinning into being, slipping through his already slick fingers.</p><p>“Are you listening?”</p><p>His attention was yanked back to Emily, who was scrunched up into a ball, eyes fluttered closed as she hummed along with the tree. He swore, but under his breath. The babies, rocking gently, didn’t even gurgle.</p><p>Chuck got up, the scaffolding already arranged for Emily’s Heaven. Her mother, dead before she knew her, sprouted pink and cheerful, as did Kim Possible, Hermione Granger, Legoland, Fantasia, the Hundred-Acre Wood and Atlantis, swarming with mermaids and fairies and wizards and bears. He set it up next to the others, all turgid with fantasies from books or movies or the meandering imaginations of their resident souls, drained of the horror of their short lives. It was difficult work, making Heaven out of dreams instead of memories, and only his refuge could have held them all, suffused with the essence of the Creator. Any angel who saw this would probably be incinerated. It upended everything they were taught.</p><p>Emily’s Heaven was completed around the time Lillith opened her milky eyes and brought Hell to the Winchesters’ new friends. He grunted in displeasure. Abominations abounded today, evidently.</p><p>“Emily,” he called, and she awoke smiling, all traces of weariness scrubbed clear from her round face. “This is your home now. Here, and wherever you go.”</p><p>“Thank you,” she said, standing tall, flickering out of the impression of his image and into his light. She did not question him or her Heaven this time, but stepped right into the portal that dissolved as soon as she had gone through. It welcomed her, enveloped her gladly, the lock to her key.</p><p>He wondered, stupidly, why he did not feel better.</p><p>Chuck forced himself to check that the other Heavens were intact and functioning, more perfunctory than genuine, his certainty of their safety ironclad. The souls there rejoiced at the slightest hint of his return, trusting, adulating, loving completely. It gave him pause as he devised a path back to his suburban hidey-hole, making him trip and stumble without meaning to. He’d forgotten how overwhelming it could be here, resounding with his greatest failures and most cherished creations, all desiring their Father.</p><p>Chuck stalled, preparing to depart, to vanish, like he always did. He cocked an ear to the side, considering, then nudged open his universe-sized mind to all of his children.</p><p>The roar of pain was overwhelming, a gale force blow to his gut that sent him to his knees, breathless, causing his palms to gush and scald the ground. It was Lucifer screaming in a blaze of hellfire but over and over, repeated like a mantra that declared blame and begged salvation in the same voice, agony layered on agony layered on doubt. It was not a wave pushing him under but the sensation of having already drowned, smothered with water and dirt, a corpse flopped limp on the shore. Chuck clutched at his head and shut them all out again, taking far longer than it should have to repel the noise. Blood drenched his temples, stinging his eyes on its way down.</p><p>
  <em>Kids, am I right?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>You got any?</em>
</p><p>Gasping, he surveyed the infants that gently quaked in their surrogate wombs, unfazed by his seizure. He waited in fear, sure one of them was about to fuss, to shake their fists and squall, frightened and helpless in an unknown place. They stayed still, their chests rising and falling in tandem, but somewhere on Earth, a spirit dragged Sam away from his brother, and Dean cursed Chuck’s name. It was a latent, whining complaint that irked him, setting off another migraine with a bang, resentment that flared up worse.</p><p>He snapped his fingers, going home to his computer and stale Chinese food and solitude, where his hands were the unblemished pale spiders of a recluse, his house empty and undemanding. It was so much easier, pretending to be human, and leaving everything and everyone to their own, terrible, cruel devices.</p><p>God was a father, the Father. Chuck, thankfully, was a deadbeat.</p>
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